Dogs after death.

I recently quoted this remark by the art critic Brian Sewell: "As for whether I fear death – I shan’t know until it’s there. All I really want is to wake up and find that every one of my 17 dogs, past and present, is round my bed. Then I shall know that I’m dead, but happily so."

It brought to mind a (once famous) footnote in chapter XXVI of F.H. Bradley's daunting and difficult magnum opus Appearance and Reality. The remarks come in a section dealing with the human desire for life after death and the inconsistencies of the standard (Christian) view. Bradley wrote:

"No one can have been so fortunate as never to have felt the grief of parting, or so inhuman as not to have longed for another meeting after death... One feels that a personal immortality would not be very personal, if it implied a mutilation of our affections. There are those too who would not sit down among the angels, till they had recovered their dog."

I have now come across another reference to a canine presence in worlds beyond. It occurs around the 8-minute mark of this account of a near-death experience.